Month: December 2007

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

Amid all this streetcar hubub, I’ve been remiss in not talking about the emerging crisis with respect to the Steel Electric ferries that service the Port Townsend-Keystone route. The 80-year-old ferries have been pulled from service and are unlikely to return.

The Everett Herald has been all over this story, and it seems like a pretty big screw-up at all levels. The state legislature approved replacements in 2001, but the replacements were too large to dock at Keystone! So now we’re looking at 16 months or so before a local shipbuilder can design and build new boats.

In the meantime, the 90-minute passenger-only ferry being proposed from Seattle to Pt. Townsend sounds great. I’d make a weekend of that.

In a press conference today, Gov. Gregoire announced plans to build three new ferries at a cost of $100M by borrowing money from other ferry projects. The passenger ferry from Seattle will begin service in January.

Fun Fact: These ferries were built in 1927 to move people around the San Francisco Bay. When the Golden Gate and Bay Bridges were built, they were sold to the Puget Sound Navigation company and renamed (via Wikipedia).

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

The No. 8 bus, scourge of many, will get more service above and beyond TransitNow, due to a partership with the city and some local businesses:

The Route 8 bus, which runs east and west on Denny Way, between Capitol Hill — past South Lake Union– and Queen Anne will come every 15 minutes between 6 and 7:30 p.m., instead of every half-hour.

The city, the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, Vulcan, Group Health and REI are each giving $21,800 to the expansion over the next two years.

“It’s going to help,” [Gretchen] DeGroot said as she waited for the No. 8 on First Avenue near Denny Way. It was 6:15 p.m., and the next bus was scheduled to arrive about 6:35 p.m. “The fun thing about the 8 is you never know when it’s going to come.

Anecdotally, it seems that reliability, not frequency, is the No. 8’s problem, as Ms. DeGroot suggests. And that’s not really the Metro’s problem, it’s the fact that Denny Way is a tough cookie of a street. I give SDOT and Metro props for doing the best with it. The light timings are acually pretty good, and they’ve all but eliminated the ability to make backup-inducing left-hand turns.

Yet, as Denny Way transforms from parking lots and gas stations to apartments and retail, the traffic is likely to increase. Will the extra No. 8 buses help, or will they just stack up 2 and 3 deep during rush hour? It’s getting to the point where it’s almost as fast to ride the No. 2 or No. 3 buses from Queen Anne, through downtown, and up Capitol Hill than to take your chances with the No. 8.

Lowering Aurora Avenue and reconnecting the street grid between Queen Anne and South Lake Union will help disperse traffic, but that project is still years off. In the meantime, it will be interesting to see how the added bus service helps.

This post originally appeared on Orphan Road.

It’s a day of nostalgia, apparently.

David Brewster interviews Seattle civic legend Jim Ellis, who worked on the 1968 “Forward Thrust” bond package:

The Forward Thrust package in 1968 would have given the area a system of amazing scope. It would have been completed in 1985 and fully paid off in 2008. It would have been heavy rail, largely in subways, with two prongs north, two prongs south, and two prongs on the Eastside. Unlike Portland’s system, which is largely on the street, this system would have been separated from traffic and much faster. It probably would have done a fair amount toward shaping dense neighborhoods and concentrating urban growth. All this at one quarter the local cost of a completed (much smaller and slower) Sound Transit system.

Elsewhere, Seattle Metblogs reminds us that the Green Line — the first line of the monorail system, was set to open December 15, 2007, otherwise known as this Saturday

IIRC, the Monorail folks eventually punted on that start date, saying that htey’d have a starter line open by then, but that it would take a couple more years to get all the way to West Seattle and Ballard.

But that’s all water under the (crumbling) bridge.